Essays highlight the interplay between opera, art and ideology across three centuries. Three broad themes are opened up from a variety of approaches: nationalism, cosmopolitanism and national opera; opera, class and the politics of enlightenment; and opera and otherness. Opera, that most extravagant of the performing arts, is infused with the contexts of power-brokering and cultural display in which it was conceived and experienced. For individual operas such contexts have shifted over time and new meanings emerged, often quite remote from those intended by the original collaborators; but tracing this ideological dimension in a work's creation and reception enables us to understand its cultural and political role more clearly - sometimes conflicting with its status as art and sometimes enhancing it. This collection is a Festschrift in honour of Julian Rushton, one of the most distinguished opera scholars of his generation and highly regarded for his innovative studies of Gluck, Mozart and Berlioz, among many others. Colleagues, associates and former students pay tribute to his work with essays highlighting the interplay between opera, art and ideology across three centuries. Three broad themes are opened up from a variety of approaches: nationalism, cosmopolitanism and national opera; opera, class and the politics of enlightenment; and opera and otherness. British opera is represented bystudies of Grabu, Purcell, Dibdin, Holst, Stanford and Britten, but the collection sustains a truly European perspective rounded out with essays on French opera funding, Bizet, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Puccini, Janacek, Nielsen, Rimsky-Korsakov and Schreker. Several works receive some of their first extended discussion in English. RACHEL COWGILL is Professor of Musicology at Liverpool Hope University. DAVID COOPER is Professor of Music and Technology at the University of Leeds. CLIVE BROWN is Professor of Applied Musicology at the University of Leeds. Contributors: MARY K. HUNTER, CLIVE BROWN, PETER FRANKLIN, RALPH LOCKE, DOMINGOS DE MASCARENHAS,DAVID CHARLTON, KATHARINE ELLIS, BRYAN WHITE, PETER HOLMAN, RACHEL COWGILL, ROBERTA MONTEMORRA MARVIN, DAVID COOPER, RICHARD GREENE, J.P.E. HARPER-SCOTT, DANIEL GRIMLEY, STEPHEN MUIR, JOHN TYRRELL.

This collection of essays addresses the issue of how to make Verdi's operas relevant to modern audiences while respecting the composer's intentions. Here, both scholars and music and stage practitioners reflect current thinking on matters such as "authentic" staging, performance practice, and the role of critical editions.

Of all operas in the standard repertory, none has had a more complicated genesis and textual history than Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. Based on a highly successful 1851 play inspired by the short stories by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, the work occupied the last decade of Offenbach's life. When he died in October 1880, the work was being rehearsed at the Opera-Comique. At once cut and rearranged, the work was performed from the start in versions that ignored the composer's final intentions. Only a few decades ago, when previously unavailable manuscripts came to light, it became possible to reconstitute the score in its real form. Vincent Giroud and Michael Kaye's The Real 'Tales of Hoffmann' tells the full story for the first time in English. After discussing how the work of Hoffmann became known and influential in France, the book includes little-known sources for the opera, especially the complete Barbier and Carre play, in French and English. It describes the genesis of the opera. The annotated libretto is published in full, with the variants, for the two versions of the opera: with spoken dialogue or recitatives. Essays explain what was done to the opera after Offenbach's death, from the 1881 Opera-Comique production to more recent restoration attempts. There is also a survey of Les contes d'Hoffmann in performance from the 1970s to the present, and supplementary information, including discography, filmography, and videography. The Real 'Tales of Hoffmann' is intended to appeal to anyone interested in the work, specialists or non-specialists. Audiences, musicologists and students of French opera and opera-comique will find it of particular interest, as will opera houses, conductors, singers, directors, and dramaturgs involved in performances of the opera.

What is the role of classical music in the 21st Century? How will classical musicians maintain their relevance and purpose? This book follows the working activities of professional orchestral musicians and opera singers as they move off stage into schools, community centres, prisons, libraries and corporations, engaging with their communities in new, rich ways through education and community engagement programmes. Key examples of collaborative partnership between orchestras, opera companies, schools and music services in the delivery of music education are investigated, with a focus on the UK's Music Hub system. The impact of these partnerships is examined, both in terms of how they inspire and foster the next generation of musicians as well as the extent to which they broaden access to quality music education. Detailed case studies are provided on the impact of classical music education programmes on social cohesion, health and wellbeing and education outcomes for students from low socio-economic communities. The implications for the future training of classical musicians are analysed, as are the new career paths for orchestral musicians and composers straddling performance and education. Opening Doors: Orchestras, Opera Companies and Community Engagement investigates the ways in which the classical music industry is reinventing its sense of purpose, never a more important or urgent pursuit than in the present decade.

This is the first book-length study of the rich operatic repertory written and performed in France during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Steven Huebner gives an accessible and colourful account of such operatic favourites as Manon and Werther by Massenet, Louise by Charpentier, and lesser-known gems such as Chabrier's Le Roi malgré lui and Chausson's Le Roi Arthus. For the first time opera lovers have available under a single cover a survey of a repertory profoundly influenced by the music of Richard Wagner.

Jenny Lind (1820-87) was one of Europe's most famous opera singers. Known as the 'Swedish Nightingale', she first rose to prominence in an 1838 performance of Weber's Freischutz. Despite her immense success over the next ten years, she retired from the stage at the age of twenty-nine. Seeking financial security to pursue her charitable interests, in 1850 she accepted the invitation of impresario P. T. Barnum to undertake a tour of the United States; this was another succession of triumphs. Henry Scott Holland (1847-1918), the theologian and social reformer, and music writer William Smith Rockstro (1823-95) used Lind's own documents, letters and diaries as the basis of this two-volume memoir, published in 1891, which focuses on the first thirty-one years of her life. Volume 1 covers Lind's Swedish childhood and early singing career, and a brief but critical period when she suffered damage to her vocal cords.

Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901) was an Italian Romantic opera composer, best known for Rigoletto, Aida, and La Traviata -- which follows the life, lioves and death of a courtesan, Violetta, from tuberculosis. Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876) was an Italian opera librettist who worked with many of the significant composers of his day, writing 10 libretti for Verdi.

Focusing on Verdi's French operas, Giger shows how the composer acquired an ever better understanding of the various approaches to French versification while gradually bringing his works in line with French melodic aesthetic. In his first French opera, Jerusalem, Verdi treated the text in an overly cautious manner, trying to avoid prosodic mistakes; in Les Vepres siciliennes he began to apply more freedom, scanning the verses against some prosodic accents to convey the lightheartedness of a melody; and in Don Carlos he finally drew on the entire palette of prosodic interpretations. Most of Verdi's melodic accomplishments in the French operas carried over into the subsequent Italian ones, setting the stage for what later would be called operatic verismo. Drawing attention to the significance of the libretto for the development of nineteenth-century French and Italian opera, this 2008 text illustrates Verdi's gradual mastery of the challenges he faced, and their historical significance.

The National Court Theatre in Mozart's Vienna provides a valuable context for Mozart's career as an opera composer in Vienna by investigating the operation of the court theatre under Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II. The author brings together a large number of hitherto unavailable archival sources, namely the diary of Count Karl Zinzendorf (from which transcriptions have been made of all passages that address the music and theatre in Vienna from Easter 1783 to Easter 1792); theatre account books (with transcriptions of payment records for all the salaried performing personnel as well as the semi-annual lists of subscribers to the boxes in the theatre); and the theatre posters, almanacs, newspapers, and records kept by the theatre administration, which have been compiled by the author into a performance calendar. The final section of the book rounds out the picture of Josephinian theatre with a discussion of the theatre's management and an analysis of the attendance figures.

This innovative account of the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership provides a unique insight into the experience of both attending and performing in the original productions of the most influential and enduring pieces of English-language musical theatre. In the 1870s, Savoy impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte astutely realized that a conscious move to respectability in a West End which, until then, had favored the racy delights of burlesque and French operetta, would attract a new, lucrative morally 'decent' audience. This book examines the commercial, material and human factors underlying the Victorian productions of the Savoy operas. Unusually for a book on 'G&S', it focuses on people and things rather than author biography or literary criticism. Examining theatre architecture, interior design, marketing, and typical audiences, as well as the working conditions and personal lives of the members of a Victorian theatre-company, 'Respectable Capers' explains how the Gilbert and Sullivan operas helped to transform the West End into the family-friendly 'theatre land' which still exists today.

This book responds to recent debates on cultural participation and the relevancy of music composed today with the first large-scale audience experience study on contemporary classical music. Through analysing how existing audience members experience live contemporary classical music, this book seeks to make data-informed contributions to future discussions on audience diversity and accessibility. The author takes a multidimensional view of audience experience, looking at how sociodemographic factors and the frames of social context and concert format shape aesthetic responses and experiences in the concert hall. The book presents quantitative and qualitative audience data collected at twelve concerts in ten different European countries, analysing general trends alongside case studies. It also offers the first large-scale comparisons between the concert experiences and tastes of contemporary classical and classical music audiences. Contemporary classical music is critically discussed as a 'high art subculture' rife with contradictions and conflicts around its cultural value. This book sheds light on how audiences negotiate the tensions between experimentalism and accessibility that currently define this genre. It provides insights relevant to academics from audience research in the performing arts and from musicology, as well as to institutions, practitioners, and artists.

As Nicholas Kenyon says, quoting Ralph Vaughan Williams in the introduction to this volume, 'We all pay lip service to Henry Purcell, but what do we really know of him?'. Many aspects of the composer's life remain obscure, but, with the approach of the tercentenary of Henry Purcell's death in 1995, much of his music would be performed again, in some cases for the first time for many years. It was clear that many issues of performance practice needed to be aired before 1995; further it was equally clear that such discussion should begin early and should be available in published form. To this end, a group of scholars and performers gathered at Exeter College, Oxford in 1993 and the contents of this volume represents some of the fruits of their deliberation. The first part of the book considers purely musical issues, and covers a wide range of topics. Peter Holman looks at the importance of the Oxford set parts for Restoration Concerted Music in the overall picture of orchestral practice in the seventeenth century. This is followed by two organological essays, one on organs (Dominic Gwynne) and the other on violins (John Dilworth). The remainder of this first section has three studies of historical performance - on Percell's "Exotic" trumpet notes (Peter Downey), on Queen Mary's Funeral Music (Bruce Wood), and ornamenting Purcell's keyboard music (H Diack Johnson) - and two concerning singers and singing - Purcell's stage singers (Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson) and on voice ranges, voice types and pitch (Timothy Morris). The second part of the book, devoted to the stage works, opens with an examination of past performances of the dramatic operas in Michael Burden's essay, 'Percell debauch'd'. Contributors then examine the importance of allegory in performing stage works (Andrew Walkling), theatrical dance (Richard Semmens), costume and etiquette (Ruth Eva Ronen), stage music (Roger Savage), and aspects of performing Dioclesian (Julia and Frans Muller) and King Arthur (Lionel Sawkins).

Music in 17th and early 18th century Italy was wonderfully rich and varied: in theatrical and secular vocal chamber music alone, we saw the rise of the solo song and cantata, and the birth and growth of opera, all establishing important new structural and expressive paradigms. But this was also a complex time of uncertainty and change, as 'old' and 'new' interacted in subtle and often surprising ways. There is still much to document, explore and explain in terms of composers and repertories and their multi-layered contexts. This collection of essays by European, British and American musicologists seeks to consolidate the recent growth interest in seventeenth century studies. It includes discussions of leading composers (d'India, Monteverdi, Rovetta, Steffani, Albinoni, Vivaldi and Handel), repertories (chamber laments, staged balli and operatic mad-scenes), geographical issues (the arrival of Neapolitan opera in Venice), institutional contexts, and iconography. Inspiration for the book was drawn from the poineering research of Nigel Fortune, to whom the volume is dedicated on his 70th birthday.

Early in his long career, the self-taught English music critic Ernest Newman (1868 1959) wrote this influential account of Gluck's life and musical achievements in relation to the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. First published in 1895, Gluck and the Opera traces the composer's ideas and his efforts to move opera forward after a period of stagnation. Musicians, thinkers and satirists had been writing for generations about the need to reform the opera, but it was Gluck who brought about far-reaching changes that paved the way for Mozart, Weber and Wagner. His most notable innovation was the fusing of the Italian and French operatic traditions. The first part of the book is a chronological account of Gluck's eventful career, which took him all over Europe but was centred on Paris and Vienna. The second part deals with Gluck in his broader cultural and intellectual context, and lists his works.

This book describes the many ways in which music was used in Italian theatrical performances between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In particular, it concentrates on Polizano's Orfeo, Machiavelli's commedies, the Florentine intermedi and early operas, and the first operas in Venice.

As the complicated relationship between music and theatre has evolved and changed in the modern and postmodern periods, music has continued to be immensely influential in key developments of theatrical practices. In this study of musicality in the theatre, David Roesner offers a revised view of the nature of the relationship. The new perspective results from two shifts in focus: on the one hand, Roesner concentrates in particular on theatre-making - that is the creation processes of theatre - and on the other, he traces a notion of 'musicality' in the historical and contemporary discourses as driver of theatrical innovation and aesthetic dispositif, focusing on musical qualities, metaphors and principles derived from a wide range of genres. Roesner looks in particular at the ways in which those who attempted to experiment with, advance or even revolutionize theatre often sought to use and integrate a sense of musicality in training and directing processes and in performances. His study reveals both the continuous changes in the understanding of music as model, method and metaphor for the theatre and how different notions of music had a vital impact on theatrical innovation in the past 150 years. Musicality thus becomes a complementary concept to theatricality, helping to highlight what is germane to an art form as well as to explain its traction in other art forms and areas of life. The theoretical scope of the book is developed from a wide range of case studies, some of which are re-readings of the classics of theatre history (Appia, Meyerhold, Artaud, Beckett), while others introduce or rediscover less-discussed practitioners such as Joe Chaikin, Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Thalheimer and Karin Beier.

Richard Wagner is remembered as one of the most influential figures in music and theatre, but his place in history has been marked by a considerable amount of controversy. His attitudes towards the Jews and the appropriation of his operas by the Nazis, for example, have helped to construct a historical persona that sits uncomfortably with modern sensibilities. Yet Wagner's absolutely central position in the operatic canon continues. This volume serves as a timely reminder of his ongoing musical, cultural, and political impact. Contributions by specialists from such varied fields as musical history, German literature and cultural studies, opera production, and political science consider a range of topics, from trends and problems in the history of stage production to the representations of gender and sexuality. With the inclusion of invaluable and reliably up-to-date biographical data, this collection will be of great interest to scholars, students, and enthusiasts.

Opera Outside the Box: Notions of Opera in Nineteenth-Century Britain addresses operatic "experiences" outside the opera houses of Britain during the nineteenth century. The essays adopt a variety of perspectives exploring the processes through which opera and ideas about opera were cultivated and disseminated, by examining opera-related matters in publication and performance, in both musical and non-musical genres, outside the traditional approaches to transmission of operatic works and associated concepts. As a group, they exemplify the broad array of questions to be grappled with in seeking to identify commonalities that might shed light in new and imaginative ways on the experiences and manifestations of opera and notions of opera in Victorian Britain. In unpacking the significance, relevance, uses, and impacts of opera within British society, the collection seeks to enhance understanding of a few of the manifold ways in which the population learned about and experienced opera, how audiences and the broader public understood the genre and the aesthetics surrounding it, how familiarity with opera played out in British culture, and how British customs, values, and principles affected the genre of opera and perceptions of it.

In Performing Opera: A Practical Guide for Singers and Directors Michael Ewans provides a detailed and practical workbook to performing many of the most commonly produced operas. Drawing on examples from twenty-four operas ranging in period from Gluck and Mozart to Britten and Tippett, it illustrates exactly how opera functions as dramatic form. Grounded in close analyses of performances of thirty scenes and five whole operas by first-rate singers and celebrated directors, Performing Opera provides readers with an appreciation of the unique challenges and skills required by performers and directors. It will assist them in their own performance and equip them with detailed knowledge of works most commonly featured in the repertoire. In the first part of the book the analysis progresses from scenes in which the singers are silent, via arias and monologues, duets and confrontations, up to ensembles. Wider issues are subsequently addressed: encounters with offstage events, encounters with the numinous, characterization, and the sense of inevitability in tragic opera.

Ever since its invention in Florence around 1600, opera has exerted a peculiar fascination for creative artists and audiences alike. A "Western" genre with a global reach, it is often regarded as the pinnacle of high art, where music and drama come together in unique ways, supported by stellar singers and spectacular staging. Yet it is also patently absurd-why should anyone sing on the stage?-and shrouded in mystique. In this engaging and entertaining guide, renowned music scholar Tim Carter unravels its many layers to offer a thorough introduction to Italian opera from the seventeenth to the early-twentieth century. Eschewing the technical music detail that all too often dominates writing on opera, Carter begins instead where the composers themselves did: with the text. Walking readers through the relationship between music and words that lies at the heart of any opera, Carter then offers explorations of five of the most enduring, emblematic, and often performed Italian operas: Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppaea; Handel's Julius Caesar in Egypt; Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro; Verdi's Rigoletto; and Pucini's La Boheme. Shedding light on the creative collusions and collisions involved in bringing opera to the stage, the various, and varying, demands of its text and music, and the nature of its musical drama, Carter shows how Italian opera has developed over the course of music history. Complete with synopses, cast lists, and suggested further reading for each opera discussed, Understanding Italian Opera is a must-read for anyone with an interest in and love for opera.

There can be little doubt that opera and emotion are inextricably linked. From dramatic plots driven by energetic producers and directors to the conflicts and triumphs experienced by all associated with opera's staging to the reactions and critiques of audience members, emotion is omnipresent in opera. Yet few contemplate the impact that the customary cultural practices of specific times and places have upon opera's ability to move emotions. Taking Australia as a case study, this two-volume collection of extended essays demonstrates that emotional experiences, discourses, displays and expressions do not share universal significance but are at least partly produced, defined, and regulated by culture. Spanning approximately 170 years of opera production in Australia, the authors show how the emotions associated with the specific cultural context of a nation steeped in egalitarian aspirations and marked by increasing levels of multiculturalism have adjusted to changing cultural and social contexts across time. Volume I adopts an historical, predominantly nineteenth-century perspective, while Volume II applies historical, musicological, and ethnological approaches to discuss subsequent Australian operas and opera productions through to the twenty-first century. With final chapters pulling threads from the two volumes together, Opera, Emotion, and the Antipodes establishes a model for constructing emotion history from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

There can be little doubt that opera and emotion are inextricably linked. From dramatic plots driven by energetic producers and directors to the conflicts and triumphs experienced by all associated with opera's staging to the reactions and critiques of audience members, emotion is omnipresent in opera. Yet few contemplate the impact that the customary cultural practices of specific times and places have upon opera's ability to move emotions. Taking Australia as a case study, this two-volume collection of extended essays demonstrates that emotional experiences, discourses, displays and expressions do not share universal significance but are at least partly produced, defined, and regulated by culture. Spanning approximately 170 years of opera production in Australia, the authors show how the emotions associated with the specific cultural context of a nation steeped in egalitarian aspirations and marked by increasing levels of multiculturalism have adjusted to changing cultural and social contexts across time. Volume I adopts an historical, predominantly nineteenth-century perspective, while Volume II applies historical, musicological, and ethnological approaches to discuss subsequent Australian operas and opera productions through to the twenty-first century. With final chapters pulling threads from the two volumes together, Opera, Emotion, and the Antipodes establishes a model for constructing emotion history from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Leading composers, producers and writers consider the role of the composer in the community in Britain today and over the last fifty years. With his Aspen award lecture (1964), Benjamin Britten expressed a unique commitment to community and place. This book revisits this seminal lecture, but then uses it as a starting point of reflection, inviting leading composers, producers and writers to consider the role of the composer in the community in Britain in the last fifty years. Colin Matthews, Jonathan Reekie and John Barber reflect on Britten's aspirations as a composer and the impact of his legacy, and Gillian Moore surveys the ideals of composers since the 1960s. Eugene Skeef and Tommy Pearson discuss the influence of the London Sinfonietta, while Katie Tearle reviews the tradition of community opera at Glyndebourne. Nigel Osborne and Judith Webster explore the role of music as therapy, and James Redwood, Amoret Abis, Sean Gregory and Douglas Mitchell look at music in the classroom and creative workshops. John Sloboda, Detta Danford and Natasha Zielazinski discuss collaboration in music-making and ways of facilitating exchanges between the composer and the audience, while Christopher Fox and Howard Skempton examine the role of modernism and the use of 'other', radical techniques to stimulate new dialogues between composer and community. Peter Wiegold and Amoret Abis interview Sir Harrison Birtwistle, John Woolrich and Phillip Cashian, and Wiegold discusses his formative experiences in encountering music-making in other cultures. All of these approaches to the role and identity of the composer throw a different light on how we address 'the composer and the community': the varied, sometimes contradictory, motivations of composers; the role of music in 'enhancing lives'; the concept of 'outreach' and the different ways this is pursued; and, finally, the meaning of 'community'. Underpinning each are genuine questions about the relationship of arts to society. This book will appeal not only to composers, performers and practitioners of contemporary music but to anyone interested in the changes in twentieth-century music practice, music in education, and the role of music and the arts in the wider community and society.